blogalicious: the equivalent of a 4 page paper

Week

This week was a pretty good one—it contained a BOGO burrito day in honor of teacher appreciation week (have you bought target gift cards for your kid’s teachers? Because we have! (nailed it)). I also booked us a houseboat in Brooklyn on airbnb for our upcoming east coast trip (will it be the best or worst vacation risk we’ve taken? ...only time will tell!). In less than a month, we will dash off well before the conclusion of our end-of-year responsibilities in order to attend the wedding of one of our dearest friends from college, hang out with my favorite brother and his family, and spend a few days in NYC (the shiny apple). I’m pretty excited about this trip, as it will afford me the opportunity to see Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party, do a food tour of the lower east side, and visit the big FAO Schwartz with a genetic descendent (among other things). Will it be a hot, sticky proto-swamp while we’re there? The houseboat has air conditioning (#1 requirement for houseboats), so I feel a bit indifferent about this question (and our impending entanglement with a NYC high pressure system).

Work

I’m participating in a work committee that I really dig—it’s all about aligning all content areas through a book that is mandatory at each grade level. So, for example, you read the Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks and in your history class, you discuss the book in the context of the great migration after slavery, in your religion class you discuss the book through the lens of the moral universe of the medical community and American culture. In science, you talk about cells, cancer and toxins. It’s a great model of holistic education and I signed up to go to a Holocaust workshop this summer to learn about the curriculum (Facing History) that inspired this thinking/our school. I’m really into it because it feels like the interconnectedness of everything (EVERYTHING!) just sprang into focus. One of the major concepts within this curriculum is the idea of the “we” and the “they” and how it completely saturates our culture. People with Harvard sweatshirts advertising themselves to everyone they pass, the wearing of uggs, the Prius. Symbols everywhere that are meant to convey something about your “we-ness”. It really resonates with me, as a person who has been in we-circles (at least academically) and now works in a profession of theys (at least in silicon valley). It’s also such a disgusting part of American culture that we first want to know what people “do” and then their education. We want to establish our baseline we-ness or they-ness before we proceed to listen to them talk for two seconds. Anyway, the workshop should be fun (future rants forthcoming!). I also see the we and they that is inherent in how we treat the environment (shipping barges of trash to Mexico, using more resources, on average, than any other earth citizens), which might inspire future work projects?

Summer

The only big summer plan I have is to spend some time in Boulder learning about NASA’s MAVEN mission, and then visiting Moab, UT, where my newly-minted river guide friend will take me on (I assume) some level 1 rapids! I’m actually really excited about this, the summer of (mostly) being in SJC. I have reluctantly come around to the notion that there are some years that traveling with a kid is just not in the best interest of anyone involved. This summer the local saltwater baby pool will be frequented, as will the local Sweet Tomatoes and move theater (diaper days are back!). Theo will be in preschool 3 days/week, which means I will have some personal time/space to finally read and work on those home projects that fall by the wayside during the year (future project blogging forthcoming!). I’m terribly sad that I am not going to be spending any time in the MS Delta this year. There are days that I feel about that place like Roy and his mashed potato mountain in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. I want to be there so bad that I am almost brought to tears. I think of ideas for crazy culturally-based science education PhD projects (teaching osmosis through koolickles and assessing it's usefulness relative to traditional projects?) that necessitate being there for extended periods of time. I contemplate whether or not I could leave my family behind (like Roy in the UFO) to be in the thick of the Delta for a sabbatical year (if my school gave sabbaticals, which it does not). To say it left a lasting impression would be an understatement, I guess.

Natan will be in Mexico for a month as an NEH scholar, which is incredibly awesome. Since the funding for the NEH seems to be in constant peril, I think it’s great that he’s going to do one this summer. I’d envisioned us all down in Mexico, but as the past few months have progressed, it just seems silly to try to take Theo down, without any babysitters, children’s museums or general kid relief. I have a feeling we’ll be down again when Theo is older, since Oaxaca is sort of Natan’s mashed potato mountain!

Warning: rant imminent

Infuriating thing: Any mention of and/or interest in “disruptive education”. Said phrase usually comes from someone who has paid a lot of money for a professional degree, in order to get a high paying job and then (of course) imbued with a renewed sense of expertise and entitlement decides that they would like to apply their business principles (with an accompanying litany of meaningless jargon; i.e. “disruption”) to everybody’s favorite punching bag, the classroom! I find it irritating when people have ideas (theoretically, of course) about how much “better” education could be if we’d just put a little technology in there! (MOOCs are BS and anyone who thinks otherwise hasn’t taken one.) They went to school, after all! They know what it’s about and how much it sucks! Never mind that their interests don’t go as deep as actually devoting their time to the field of education (it doesn’t pay enough, you know, and it’s not a flashy job by American cultural norms. U.S.A. forever!). Let me tell you, if there is one thing I know about education, it is that people who think school sucks are speaking ignorantly from within a bubble of privilege. Oh yes, standardized testing sucks and there are things about school that are unfair and disconnected from the real world, but I would wager a lot of that happens in financial institutions as well (that have the privilege to not struggle with a lack of money to do things like buy TP for the bathrooms). Really, a school’s function is as a community. It is a place where kids from chaotic lives (and there are so many) find order and predictability. It is also a place where kids learn how to interact with each other and do that collaborative work that businesses love their employees to feel comfortable with. It is a place where they are taught about evolution, science and technology when their parents are uneducated. It is also (at least at my school) the place where the seeds of the future worker they are to become are lain. Public school, in particular, is the place where kids with learning differences can go when the fancy private schools won’t accept them because they have an IEP. They are mechanisms of social justice and cannot be “shaken up” and “made better” without a significant investment of capital, unions and the utilization of models that work elsewhere (which, unsurprisingly, usually involve the diversion of money to the poorest kids). “Disruption” via technology is meaningless business blather (busiblather?). I guess don’t get me started on this topic?!

Pictures!

OK, lastly, some pictures from spring break (in that precious window of about 24 hours when Theo was on the mend and I was on the way down, but not yet incapacitated).

We took our nephew to the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk (and thanks to The Lost Boys, I will always and forever love this place). My sister-in-law is over my shoulder.